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Scarlet, woolen bands and tassels adorned their broad foreheads and wide-sweeping, black-tipped horns, and here and there a scarlet drop their flanks, where the goad had pricked them too shrewdly. And upon it all the unrelenting southern sun looked down, and Helen de Vallorbes' unrelenting eyes looked forth. One of those quick realisations of the inexhaustible excitement of living came to her.
It would seem superfluous to encourage or inculcate that, for surely wherever two or three petticoats are gathered together, there, as far as my experience goes, is agitation of necessity in the midst of them." Madame de Vallorbes leaned back with a little sigh and air of exquisite resignation. "All the same, the majority of women are unhappy enough, heaven knows!
Later still while Helen de Vallorbes paid her visit at Newlands it grew denser yet, heavy, torpid, close yet cold, penetrated by earthy odours as the atmosphere of a vault, oppressive to the senses, baffling to sight and hearing alike. From out it, half-leafless branches, like gaunt arms in tattered draperies, seemed to claw and beckon at the passing carriage and its occupants.
She laid her rosy finger-tips together, her elbows resting on the table. "But I am disinclined to disappear. I have a number of things to say. Take that question of going to the opera, for instance. Half Naples will be there, and I know more than half Naples, and more than half Naples knows me. I do not crave to run incontinently into the arms of any of de Vallorbes' many relations.
Yours always, Reading which gentle, yet in a sense daring, words, Richard's shame took on another complexion, but one by no means calculated to mitigate the burning of it. His treachery towards de Vallorbes became almost vulgar and of small moment beside his cruelty to this superbly magnanimous woman, his mother.
"Do you dare to pretend not to recognise me?" he literally gasped. "On the contrary I recognise you perfectly." "I have written to you repeatedly." "You have written to me with a ridiculous and odious persistence." Madame de Vallorbes picked her steps. The pavement was uneven, the heat great.
As once, long ago, Helen de Vallorbes could have danced and clapped her hands in naughty glee. For her hunting had prospered above her fondest hopes. She had much ado to stifle the laughter which bubbled up in her pretty throat. She was in the humour to pelt peacocks royally, had such pastime been possible.
But at this juncture the conversation suffered interruption by the throwing open of the door and entrance of Madame de Vallorbes. "Pray let no one move," she said, rather as issuing an order than preferring a request for her father, Lord Fallowfeild, all the gentlemen, had risen on her appearance save Richard.
I don't choose to take the responsibility of creating the widow and the fatherless whenever one of my crew chances to fall sick and depart into the unknown." Richard talked on, very evidently for the mere sake of passing the time. And all the while those eyes, which told nothing, dwelt quietly upon Helen de Vallorbes until she became nervously impatient of their scrutiny.
Sorry or not, so it is." Madame de Vallorbes looked at him keenly. Her attitude was strained. Her face sombre with thought. "My God! my God!" she exclaimed, "that I should sit and listen to all this! And yet you were never more attractive. There is an unnatural force, unnatural beauty about you. You are ill, Richard. You look and you speak as a man might who was about to join hands with death."
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